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NY Times, March 11, 2019
Carolee Schneemann, Visionary Feminist Performance Artist, Dies at 79
By Holland Cotter
Carolee Schneemann, a prime mover of performance art, a feminist
visionary and one of the most influential artists of the late 20th
century, died on Wednesday at her home in New Paltz, N.Y. She was 79.
The cause was breast cancer, said Wendy Olsoff, co-founder of the
gallery P.P.O.W., which, along with Galerie LeLong, represented Ms.
Schneemann in New York. She had lived with the disease for more than two
decades.
Ms. Schneemann found instant notoriety early on. In 1964, in Paris and
New York, she staged an epochal performance event titled “Meat Joy.” Set
to a pop-score composed by her husband then, the avant-garde composer
James Tenney, the work had the appearance of an orgiastic free-for-all,
with men and women, including the artist, rolling around on the floor in
bikini briefs slathering each other with blood-red paint and clutching
dead fish and chickens.
At regular intervals from 1963 to 1967, Ms. Schneemann and Mr. Tenney
filmed themselves having sex. She then edited the footage into a film
called “Fuses,” in which the couple are seen in close-up in their
darkened bedroom — they shot their lovemaking by passing small cameras
back and forth — with a rural landscape of changing seasons visible
through a window.
Most radically, the entire film is framed as if seen through the eyes of
an observant but unjudging third party, a feline named Kitch, the first
of several “muse cats” that Ms. Schneemann bonded with and included in
her art over the years.
For the startling 1975 performance piece “Interior Scroll,” Ms.
Schneemann stood nude on a table, posing like a studio model, while
reading from a book of her collected writings titled “Cezanne, She Was a
Great Painter.” The writings included a litany of misogynistic reactions
a female artist could expect to encounter in her career, like these:
BE PREPARED:
to have your brain picked
to have the pickings misunderstood
to be mistreated whether your success
increases or decreases
if you are a woman (and things are not utterly changed)
they will almost never believe you really did it
(what you did do)
they will patronize you humor you
try to sleep with you want you to transform them
with your energy
She then put the book down and slowly extracted a narrow strip of
typewritten paper from her vagina, reading aloud the text on the scroll
as it emerged. The words included a direct address to a contemporary
filmmaker and theorist — female, as it happened — who had dismissed her
work as “diaristic indulgence.”
Ms. Schneemann encountered critical resistance regularly, often from
what seemed to be conflicting directions. Some feminists viewed her
body-positive, pro-sensual art as exploitative, not as a bold assertion
of female agency. In contrast, in 1969, when she screened “Fuses” at the
Cannes Film Festival, an audience made up almost exclusively of male
critics greeted it with anger: The film, it seemed, wasn’t pornographic
enough for them. They saw it as a tease.
Carolee Schneemann was born on Oct. 12, 1939, into a middle-class family
in Fox Chase, Pa., then a rural neighborhood of Philadelphia. Her father
was a country doctor. She remembered poring over his anatomy books when
she was very young.
“There was always physicality around us,” she said in an interview,
“leaking, spilling out of boundaries, wounded farmers with bleeding
limbs, hemorrhages, infections. No fantasy of the sanitized body in this
household.”
Ms. Schneemann had an early interest in art and the natural world, and
in 1955, over her family’s objections, she entered Bard College, in the
Hudson Valley, on a full scholarship to study painting. There she ran
into problems. The all-male studio faculty was primarily interested in
having her pose for them. When, on her own initiative, she produced
nude-self-portraits, she was expelled for a year on grounds of, as she
put it, “moral turpitude.”
The punitive exile — she later returned to earn a degree — proved
fortunate. She enrolled in the art program at Columbia University, where
she met Mr. Tenney. She continued to paint in a gestural style that
borrowed something from Cezanne and a lot from Abstract Expressionists
like Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. In her paintings of the 1950s,
landscapes and bodies share a charge of organic energy. A nude portrait
of Mr. Tenney could be mistaken for a tangle of tree limbs, or a garden
blooming. The couple divorced in 1968.
At the time, the high-minded anguish attributed to Abstract
Expressionism had little appeal for her. What mattered in “action
painting” was action, she thought — evidence of bodily motion. She took
this aesthetic beyond wielding brushes to adding found matter to the
surfaces of her canvases, then cutting them up and adding them to
three-dimensional constructions, some with motorized components.
By the 1960s, these assemblages had become environments against which,
and within which, she performed, smearing her nude body with paint and
grease and surrounding it with props: live snakes, shattered glass, a
cow skull. Such performances were captured in a photographic series
titled “Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera.” Shot by the
Icelandic Pop artist Erró, they suggest erotic archaic rituals amplified
by a Dadaist wit.
It was a short, logical step from these studio solos into a theater. Ms.
Schneemann made the transition as a founding member of Judson Dance
Theater, along with the choreographer-performers Deborah Hay and Yvonne
Rainer and the artist Robert Morris.
In the Judson aesthetic, everyday actions — walking, running, lovemaking
— had expressive dimensions. “Meat Joy” was a natural, if operatically
scaled, product of its spirit, and it was carefully choreographed. Ms.
Schneemann had plotted its movements in preliminary drawings.
If “Meat Joy” reflected the liberationist spirit of its day, other work
tapped into its dark political realities, specifically the war in
Vietnam. In her 1965 “Viet-Flakes,” a video camera scans newspaper
clippings of battlefield atrocities as if from the perspective of a
marauding fighter plane. Two years later, she incorporated the film into
a monumental stage piece called “Snows,” in which performers, taking
directions from the audience, enacted sculptural tableaus derived from
war pictures.
Just as Ms. Schneemann was forthright in advocating for self-determined
pleasure, she was bold in confronting transience and mortality. A
1994-95 installation, “Mortal Coils,” was a multimedia memorial to 17
friends who had died. “Terminal Velocity,” in 2001, was based on
enlarged newspaper photographs of people falling from the doomed World
Trade Center towers on Sept. 11 that year. (She took critical heat for
using these images so soon after 9/11.) In a multimedia installation
called “Known/Unknown: Plague Column” (1995/96), shown at P.P.O.W., she
focused on her own experience with breast cancer.
And she entered territories where few other artists were venturing, like
interspecies communication. A video titled “Kitch’s Last Meal” (1973-78)
is a five-hour gesture of mourning for the loss of a beloved companion.
A 2008 video, “Infinity Kisses — the Movie,” in which Ms. Schneemann
shares kisses with Kitch’s feline successors, may be her most
unguardedly sensual work.
In a half-century career of productivity — encompassing painting,
sculpture, collage, drawing, bookmaking, photography, performance,
installation, film and writing — Ms. Schneemann found little support in
a mainstream art world.
In the 1960s and 1970s, she had no gallery representation. She had to
wait until 1996 for a modest museum survey: “Carolee Schneemann: Up to
and Including Her Limits,” organized by Dan Cameron at the New Museum in
Manhattan. (The show got its title from an installation in which she
suspended herself in a tree-surgeon’s halter and drew on the surrounding
walls, converting her body into a mark-making utensil.)
Ms. Schneemann, who lived in the Springtown section of New Paltz, is
survived by a brother and sister.
In 1999, she wrote to the MacArthur Foundation: “I am not the only woman
artist with a distinguished history who has no way to sustain her work,
nor provide for her future. I’m enclosing a bibliography as well as an
exhibition and lecture sheet to clarify this extremely paradoxical
history, the punishing facts of this mythic ‘career.’ ”
But in the last few years she began to be acknowledged as the
history-shaper she was. In 2015, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in
Austria organized a near-comprehensive career retrospective, which later
traveled to MoMA PS1 in Queens. In 2017, she took the international
spotlight when she was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement
at the Venice Biennale.
Most important was the growing recognition of her influence on
high-profile younger figures like Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney and
Pipilotti Rist, and, directly or indirectly, on newer generations of
artists who take the body, sexuality and gender as their brief. A born
collaborator, Ms. Schneemann was well known for her generosity to fellow
artists, and for her tireless drive to keep working despite “every sort
of conceivable resistance.”
“Death is greedy,” she wrote near the end of last year, “So on we go,
with all the love and appreciation we can express to each other.”
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